Success in any area of life demands that the tools
and vehicle that has to be used must be in good shape. Tired, worn out
parts will not be conducive to the maintenance of on going success and
the kind of lifestyle you would like to live.
You need to understand how your body can cause limitations
and ill health so that you can get it into top working order. For thousands
of years man has been dedicated to investigating how the body functions.
What makes it survive in a seemingly aggressive environment? How do the
organs work and what stops them working? How does each cell maintain itself
and why do they die? At the same time the investigation of the mind and
thought has been on- going.
But the two groups of investigators have, for the most
part, kept their investigations separate, believing that the mind had little
or no role in the health of the body except in extreme circumstances. The
medical model has at last begun to recognise that whatever affects the
body affects the mind, and more importantly, whatever is created in the
mind will eventually show itself outwardly in the physical body.
Masses of evidence and research over the past twenty years
are finally being recognised as important in the understanding of how the
mind- body interaction takes place. The mechanism and result of emotional
and physical stress is beginning to be understood in a highly refined way.
We know that the original event that sustains the abnormal levels of stress
often occurs before the age of 5 years. Such "original sensitising events" are often suppressed from conscious memory.
As a result, we may find that we are experiencing anxieties
and emotions that appear to have no bearing on our current experience.
Memories are bound together by their emotional content, creating large
groups of memories, all with the same kind of information or emotional
experience. When sufficient memories of a similar nature are bound together
in a belief, value or attitude toward a specific life circumstance, a similar
event of a significant nature may well trigger serious emotional and physiological
outcomes. We become aware of these outcomes as symptoms of stress, anxiety
and emotional dis-ease. The dis-ease may then be converted to disease in
the physical body.
Just
being in a certain environment that has negative connections to past memory
is often sufficient to create quite serious reactions at a conscious level.
This is often the case with the work environment when you do not enjoy
your work or when someone at work is giving you a "hard time".
Over a period of time just the sight of the building in which you work
becomes a trigger for the symptoms of anxiety, the tightening of stomach
muscles, sweaty palms, rapid breathing.
Some interesting work in the United States on the incidence
of heart attack came to some startling conclusions which demonstrate the
effectiveness of these 'mental connections". More heart attacks occur
in our society on one particular day of the week. What day do you think
that might be? If you said Monday you're right! And at what time do you
think more heart attacks occurred on that day? That's right, 9.00am. The
emotional thought/feeling reaction of showing up at work when the existing
experience of the work place was negative was enough to create the physical
changes necessary to create a heart attack!
Now you might think that by doing this the mind is trying
to do you harm, but if fact it thinks it is helping you and protecting
you. It is doing what you actually want it to do - stop you from having
to work and suffer from the anxieties and dramas of that particular part
of your life. It may not be what you want at a conscious level but your
beliefs at a deeper unconscious level allow for this kind of activity even
if it does seem to be destructive.
It is in fact conforming to the prime directive of the
unconscious part of the mind, protection of the ego. Emile Coue', in his
classic "Self Mastery through Autosuggestion" explains this phenomenon
well. "When the will (consciousness) comes into conflict with
imagination (unconscious) then the imagination will always win".
As an example of this imagine in your mind that a forty
feet long timber plank is lying on the ground in front of you. The plank
is only one foot wide but you would easily be able to walk from end to
end without stepping off. Now suspend the same plank across the gap between
two buildings a hundred feet in the air, and try the same feat. Do you
think you would get to the other side? With most people, except for trapeze
artists, the immediate image that comes to mind is one of falling one hundred
feet to the ground. The unconscious mind will accept that image as an instruction
and will begin to create that outcome unless you are able to communicate
with it to give it different instructions! Yet your conscious mind does
not want that outcome - the imagination will always win.
A vast amount of documented work is being compiled on
the effect of conditioning on our conscious awareness and in the physical
body. The cutting edge of science, especially physics, is showing us that
we are not really solid as we have believed for hundreds of thousands of
years. Everything we perceive is variations in the energy of a "unified
field". That field appears to be intelligent as is every part of it
including the parts of it we regard as being ourselves. And when we look
at the parts of us we regard as organs, bones and cells, the latest physiological
research is indicating that each part of us is intelligent and "thinks
for itself"!
If a stimulus comes to the awareness from outside our
mind we react to that stimulus by producing emotions or activity. We use
to think that the brain had to process this information before the body
could react, but now it does not appear that this is so. The brain transmits
signals from one part to another via "neurotransmitters" which
are chemical messengers which migrate across the minute gaps between cells.
We use to think they only occurred in the brain as we BELIEVED that this
was the only part of the body that is able to "think". We now
know that every cell in the body has the capacity to manufacture these
neurotransmitter molecules and they do as appropriate to produce a particular
reaction. But they don't wait for a command from the brain. Every appropriate
area of the body reacts simultaneously to thoughts to produce the relevant
transmitter and hormones that allow the physical body to function correctly,
or incorrectly if the beliefs you have allow it to.
